I've been having trouble embedding videos in the page like you just did - hence all the text links to the videos in my previous post about the recovery effort... I wonder what I'm doing wrong - the [video] tags ain't workin'!

Anyway:

QuoteOrbComm

Our schedule for our OG2 Mission 1 Launch has been revised to Thursday, June 12 between 9:07 pm and 10:01 pm ET at launch pad SLC-40. The back-up date is now scheduled for the evening of Friday, June 13. We are planning to arrive at the Cape next week to re-encapsulate our satellites. We will continue to provide updates as we get closer to launch.

Weather is currently green, forecast gives a 70% chance of favorable conditions at liftoff time. Update on the webcast side of things, start time is 21:35 UTC, and a good alternate viewing location is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzX_wFm4OH4

As the saying goes, you cant make an omelette without breaking some eggs. That looks surprisingly trivial - rocket goes up into the sky, rocket blows up into the air - yet pretty spectacular.

I'm not really gloating, but this actually worth posting because I want to point out that failures are the normal part of any development process and not only limited to some "backward technology". Their presence among other more successful results usually indicate that some serious work is going on. I'll be waiting for results of analysis.

^ Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX at a TEDx talk in October last year, talking about how they were outright hoping to "tunnel one of these vehicles into the ground" for some "spectacular video", because if you're not blowing things up, you're not pushing the technology past its limits, and you're not finding out exactly where those limits lie, and why.

The video of the auto-destruct F9r-Dev1 seems to show the rocket pitching over, almost horizontal... if intentional, that's a pretty extreme test of its limits

In other news, AsiaSat 6 will be making a launch attempt on Wednesday. The weather forecast is so far favourable, with the probability of a violation hovering between 20% and 40% - reasonably good odds for a launch!

We all seemed to lose interest in this thread just before the OrbComm OG2 launch, so I guess it's time to bring us back up to date:

OG2 finally launched on July 14th 2014:

The first stage re-entry went extremely well, and the rocket touched down on the ocean's surface successfully at 0 speed, then cut its engines and fell over... right into a wave which split the tank and caused an explosion. Amazingly, SpaceX still released the re-entry and landing footage from the onboard cameras within a week (The camera cuts out before the explosion, Michael Bay was reported to be inconsolable):

And a few weeks later, they released some amazing footage from a chase-plane, of the rocket descending from the clouds and gently kissing the ocean. Just a reminder: this is a 12-storey (or more) tall rocket falling out of the sky, and this footage plays at one quarter speed:

In the mean time, they had successfully launched AsiaSat 8 on a legless version of the Falcon 9 v1.1, and inserted it into their most precise geosynchronous orbit yet, well exceeding the average precision of their competitors. That launch also set the company record for the fastest pad turn-around at 21 days, 16 hours and 45 minutes - the fastest rocket turn-around in decades, I believe. After all the delays on OG2, that's pretty impressive.

Since then, they've turned the pad around, and AsiaSat 6 is currently sitting on SLC-40 at KSC CCAFS , preparing to launch on Wednesday, 27th of August at 04:50:00 UTC.